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Harvard Scientists Say It's Time To Start Thinking About Engineering the Climate
merbs writes: Harvard has long been home to one of the fiercest advocates for climate engineering. This week, Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences published a research announcement headlined "Adjusting Earth's Thermostat, With Caution." That might read as oxymoronic — intentionally altering the planet's climate has rarely been considered a cautious enterprise — but it fairly accurately reflects the thrust of several new studies published by the Royal Society, all focused on exploring the controversial field of geoengineering.
Might as well learn to be good at mopping.
We've been doing unintentional geoengineering for hundreds of years now, why would some intentional geoengineering be so bad?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Their own students have already started trying to manipulate global warming by suing their precious alma mater
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It's bringing back suppressed memories of Highlander 2!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
That's why they're calling it climate change now. It's only "warming" in the sense of a global average, it really means lots of warming in some places and a little cooling in others as the climate changes. You're behind the times on this stuff.
Then we go into a Maunder Minimum and the skiing conditions will certainly improve.
Yes, if we do it before Russia and Canada warm up :-P
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Then if it works we'll have a bonus planet to live it. Win Win :)
- Things are the way they are because they're coded that way -
Sure. Let's engineer it. Just tell me what the optimum global mean temperature is, and I'll get right on it.
(It's no more difficult than any of the other projects that I've been assigned. "Invent a machine that can do X. At a lower cost than a worker in China."
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing for money.
I think it was called Snow Piercer. Do we really want to do this?
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
We screwed up the ozone layer but are already well along the way to fix it. reference
We can create conditions favorable for earthquakes (fracking) and we can redirect lava flows. reference
The reason why people think climate can not be engineered is ignorance.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I think the idea that we are going to engineer the environment is crazy and dangerous. The fact is we don't HAVE to keep dumping CO2 into the air. We can dramatically shift our priorities and resources to finding alternative energy.
Granted, the economic incentives for clean energy aren't there right now, but is capitalism a suicide pact?
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Countries (including US) are actively doing things to adjust the climate already. The sad part is we are already doing things to influence the climate that we have no clue how we are affecting things in the long term. We can't even come to a real conclusion on global warming and what is causing it... let alone figuring out what would happen if we try to correct it or adjust it purposefully. Even if we could adjust the climate temperature it could just be building us up for a much bigger natural adjustment to compensate.
It seemed remarkably appropriate that this was the cookie at the bottom of the thread:
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."
-- Bertrand Russell
In the arctic and antarctic there is plenty of warming - the ice sheets and glaciers are thinning, and that is something that is very measurable.
For which, there are a lot of excuses but not much warming... all that time CO2 has continue to increase so obviously what temperature changes there are, is disconnected from CO2.
If you find that reassuring I don't think you understand the scale of the problem.
IMHO the problem with the current discussions going on is that people aren't taking the shades of grey into consideration in what's mostly a black and white debate.
I think getting people to admit that human activity does contribute to some level of climate imbalance is nearly a no brainer, especially for the people who's voices really matter. The question is to what extend do we cause climate problems. Being open to an honest discussion on that level would be a lot more productive than the current shouting match we have to endure. Part of being open and honest is admitting that we really don't have all the answers and we can only try to base the discussion on trends. That's no easy task in and of itself.
This brings up my second point of bad "science" journalism and bad models. Most reporting on the matter is hard to take seriously because we've been hearing the worst case scenario (that hasn't come to fruition) for so long that the naysayers are given an easy out to taking the scientific community seriously. How can one not scoff when we've heard in the 1980s that by 2010 NYC'ers were going to be up to their knees in sea water? The models in play just aren't producing the results that have been promised. The alternative to this is for everyone who is a player in this game to go back and get degrees in climatology and statistical probability. That just isn't going to happen. Science journalism has to mold itself in such a way that it isn't always jumping for Revelation-styled predictions or the conversation will fail to get traction. A great tangent to this is the concept of peak oil. I've been hearing about peak oil for 30 years and, like fusion, the oil crisis is "only a decade away" but we don't have any solid indication of that. It's hard to take the boy who cried wolf seriously.
It's an uphill battle, no doubt, but it's hard mostly because we've either scared ourselves to death or calmed ourselves by the devices of bad models, bad presentation and a good deal of outright lies.
You are assuming that a warming climate is more helpful, but you could have a warm dry desert which doesn't help any of us. Or it may be that in some areas it will be a desert - in others it might be more like what you describe.
There are no guarantees that the outcome will be one to our liking.
You have only to look at the jungle compared to that arctic to realize that...
Unless you also compare the jungle to, say, the Sahara.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
There's this thing called a "desert," you should look it up.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Let's hope that Harvard teaches their engineers more restraint, balance, common-sense, concern for the common good, and other things that are positive for society and the world than they teach their MBAs.
Said the anonymous coward.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
I can't tell whether you're joking, or totally delusional.
I am convinced we will eventually build a sunshade, out at the first (inner) Earth-Sun Lagrange point. It won't help with ocean acidification, but it would make a global thermostat possible.
And, it will be good practice on fixing Venus.
You mean that the Antarctic sea ice is growing. "Ice sheet" refers to the land ice.
We shouldn't be fooling around like this. It's obvious we don't understand, or are too corrupt and greedy to admit, that there's no problem.
Its ironic that one of the potential benefits of geoengineering research is that it will force many climate change deniers to admit that its possible for human activity to have major deleterious effects on Earth's climate.
I was just arguing with ultra conservative dumbfucks on Facebook who think climate change is a media conspiracy. Now that they're shrunk to like 3% of the population (and their own stupidity is hopefully killing them off) I think we have a level of support that could actually get this done. I think we have numbers from 10,000 years ago from trees. We have numbers from Mt St Helens. We have numbers from more recent volcanoes. We have simulations over years from nuclear weapons. We also have giant food reserves in bunkers. I say go for it.
What could possibly go wrong?
1. Since these scientists are a long way from sure about which projection/simulations they do are correct, wouldn't such Geo-engineering would be pointless?
2. The Geo-engineering we are talking about here "typically consists of dispersing sulfate aerosols - sulfuric acid - into the atmosphere". FFS that's like the way doctors treat people by pumping them full of drugs instead of treating the causes of disease. Have these scientists considered re-forestation, perhaps schemes to take back deserts, schemes to replant woods and forests across the EU and America etc where there were forests previously and looking at ways to stop the destruction of the ocean habitats.
3. Reducing CO2 emissions, isn't that Geo-engineering?
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So herewith, a repost: If we really are changing the climate, we're already geoengineering, so why not geoengineer the world back to normal? The biggest problem with doing so would be defining "normal". Russia and Canada like the world a little warmer, and are not going to appreciate our refreezing it.
You first need a lot of water to make a jungle. High temperatures are only a secondary requirement.
Would it make you feel better if a scientific journal published a paper?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
On a side note, can you imagine the United Nations agreeing to a planetary geoengineering plan? I can't.
Yes I can, actually. And they will. The question is, how many billions of people are going to die before this happens. Climate change is occurring, this is a hard fact. Most times in nature, change doesn't precipitate gradual linear effects, but rather a tipping point where things happen very rapidly. Sooner or later, we are going to cross an environmental tipping point, and you will see some sudden massive flooding or crop failure and a lot of people will die.Hopefully, not too many, but I suspect that it is going to be a lot. You might even see some wars of extermination fought over critical resources, such as potable water supplies.
The simple fact is, people cannot continue their current behavior. The way you live with a planetary population of 1 billion isn't the same when you have a planetary population of 10 billion. Either we will come to some global consensus about how we will fix this problem, or vast numbers of people will die and the population will be reduced to the point where change isn't needed. Nature will 'find its level' in any event.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You tweak a bit on the cooling side and get a repeat of the Maunder Minimum; then what?
Do you lose 25% of the population by starvation and freezing again as before?
You are assuming that a warming climate is more helpful, but you could have a warm dry desert which doesn't help any of us. Or it may be that in some areas it will be a desert - in others it might be more like what you describe.
There are no guarantees that the outcome will be one to our liking.
And "turning down the thermostat" does guarantee the outcome will be to our liking?
If we can't even manage to do the easy things, like limiting human population growth, re-wilding, going after polluters and corporate liability-dumpers, switching away from fossil fuels, etc etc etc, what chance are we gonna have to to do **HARD** stuff, like modifying the weather??
Geoengineering, like CCS, is bullshit trotted out by pro-business 'conservatives' to claim that even if climate change *IS* humanity's fault, then we have an excuse to do nothing, because our grandkids will take care of the problem.
I wouldn't expect anything less from greedy, clueless, Me-generation conservatives, to be honest.
Its ironic that one of the potential benefits of geoengineering research is that it will force many climate change deniers to admit that its possible for human activity to have major deleterious effects on Earth's climate.
...assuming it works, doesn't require the entire GDP of multiple nations, and a timescale that would put trees to shame, let alone humans.
Here's the funny part: in your haste to make a snark, you forget something: Humans can certainly alter clime - on a micro scale. Whether or not they can do it on a macro scale (let alone global) within any sort of sane time frame is a whole different (and honestly open) debate.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
There was a 30-year period in the mid-1900's when there was significant cooling. That does not negate the fact that the trend over the last 150 years is, by human historical standards, rapid heating.
Now, do you think that 20 years of little to no warming disproves the connection between CO2 and average temperature?
I don't care for online climate change deniers.
You use the word "facts". Let's talk about facts. Suppose I tried to debate this nutjob.
First of all, this person already decided what they "believe," and everything they read will be twisted into evidence supporting their predetermined conclusion. Therefore, right off the bat, actual debate is impossible. They've already decided what they think is true.
So, we'd go back and forth. They would post evidence supporting their perspective, and off to Google I'd go to dig up rebuttals from actual climatologists. That will take time because the climate change denial groups are always generating new bunk data, new misinterpretations of published papers, and new misrepresentations of past quotes. One can't just keep a database of counterevidence because they've always got new bullshit.
After however much time I'd spend researching rebuttals, that person would just keep replying with more bullshit. They either wouldn't read the counterpoints or wouldn't understand them. Then they'd pull out the ever-present Final Tactic by telling me that they know what they're talking about because they're a pilot, physics student, congressional aide, or whatever. They'll try to follow up bunk "science" with anecdote.
By the time the whole thing concluded, I will have failed to convince them because it was never a possibility to begin with. They will have failed to convince me because I actually look at the science and don't delude myself. Then, out there somewhere at their keyboard will sit some layperson who just wants to get along with their church group, some paid anti-climate change shill, or just an everyday idiot repeating what they've been told.
So.
1. They won't convince anybody.
2. Nobody can convince them.
Therefore, their bringing the subject up to start with is masturbatory and annoying. It accomplishes nothing that walking into a movie theater and announcing over a megaphone that the world is flat wouldn't accomplish.
The most constructive response is thus, "God damnit, can you just stop this already?" Optionally, this may be peppered with, "Please just go away."
Global warming failed to kill us fast enough so we have to help it along?
The article is specifically talking about Solar Radiation Management (SRM). This is adjusting temperature by reflecting more heat back to space, not by reducing CO2 emissions or sequestering CO2. So any other effects of increased CO2, such as ocean acidification, remain in place.
Capitialism is destroying the environment, it is a very stupid way to do things. It will be the end of us.
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Yes, I'm pretty sure you could engineer the climate for Sudan without negatively affecting Ethiopia. Of course, the means of doing that is probably via land reclamation techniques, but that's really true for pretty much any major climate improvement at this point in our planet's life.
Ahh!! It's so hard not to feed the troll!
You are assuming that a warming climate is more helpful, but you could have a warm dry desert
Wrong. A warmer climate releases more moisture into the atmosphere from the oceans, which winds up on land. You always have a net positive effect on moisture...
This has also been noted in explanations of why snowfall amounts are up in some areas.
Deserts are the result of specific weather patterns not allowing moisture to flow to a region, but it always goes somewhere...
We also have proof of this simple fact, the medieval warm period was a fair amount warmer than we are now, and it was in fact a great time for agriculture.
Lastly, you are again ignoring jungles which are as hot as deserts... you seem to think that a great amount of heat automatically means desert which is very far from the truth.
But the most rise we are predicted to see anyway is about 2-3C.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ahh, I wish it were that simple. I could just sit myself and my family down to a marathon of Fox News. Then we would be magically wisked into a universe where us and our descendants will never have to deal with climate change.
Screw you guys! I'm going to the Right Dimension!
Sure, just redesign the Euro to be shiny paper and print enough of it to cover about a hemisphere or so.
And the warming that there has been was more often the low temperatures becoming less cool rather than the high temperature becoming higher; most consider this a sign of the Urban Heat Island effect rather than a CO2 heat retention effect.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Actually wouldn't that prove humans can have a POSITIVE effect? To prove a deliterious one they would have to fail, and fail catostrophically.
I would like the temperature raised by 10ÂF. That would be most pleasant. Oh, wait, we're already making significant progress on that! Bravo! I like.
(If you want to complain about warming please move to Vermont or Maine, or any other northern region this time of year. We'll show you why warming is such a great idea!)
who gave us the Harvard MBA.
That hasn't worked out so well.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I would suggest that the GMO itself isn't actually harming anything. Rather, it's the regulatory framework around it that let Monsantu patent gene sequences and then sue farmers over them.
In many cases direct genetic modification is *less* intrusive than other techniques of creating more suitable species of plants...the non-GMO method generally involves forcing random mutations via chemicals/radiation and then selecting for the traits you want. Of course there may be a bunch of other mutations that you didn't select for/against that could cause problems in people.
We've been conducting a geo-engineering experiment by increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere and, so far, it isn't going well.
You're right. As an experiment to show CO2 causes warming it totally has sucked, because it shows in fact the opposite - over a decade without warming even as CO2 emissions continue to increase.
It's quite obvious at this point temperature changes have very little correlation to CO2 added to the atmosphere. Which was only logical one you realized what a tiny part of the atmosphere CO2 really is... so our percentage increases of it add little in terms of absolute amounts.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Imagine you have a temperate zone with low-moderate precipitation. (Like the north american prairies, for example.)
Now suppose a warming climate modified the weather systems so that some of that area got monsoon rains (washing away all the topsoil, flooding the cities, etc.) and the other part became a desert. The overall precipitation could be slightly net-positive, but it's vastly worse from a usefulness-to-humans standpoint.
I'm sure you pedantic scamps have plenty of anecdotes to "disprove" any reasonable take on what average temperatures are ideal for creatures currently living on earth. Yours in particular (which I'd group under outliers) would be less of a concern today because we are not limited to technology of the 1600's.
All I'm trying to say is it would be least disruptive to life on earth if we didn't suddenly create (among other things) a situation in which costal areas (where something like 90% of earth's human population lives) became unstable to the point where it was preferable for those 6 billion people to want to move somewhere else instead of trying to make the new situation work where they are at.
In simpler terms, the most amicable situation for the vast majority of everything as it is now, is for temperature/climate to remain as it is now or change very very gradually. I'm ready more anecdotes to refute that, maybe attack grammar and spelling while you're at it /openingpandora'sbox.
No matter which side your on, Google can find enough dis-credited research papers to support your position.
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In the arctic and antarctic there is plenty of warming - the ice sheets and glaciers are thinning, and that is something that is very measurable.
Actually it's not that measurable, satellites provide pretty good proxy estimates, but before satellites it's a lot of guess-work and extrapolation for a few physical measurements.
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We can't even explain the current "non-warming" period or its causes, what makes us think that man-handling the climate will do more good than harm? Also, who decides who gets the rain and who gets the drought? Vast conclusions from half-vast data..
Organization? You must be joking..
So there was no ice age 100k years ago? It's all anthropogenic global warming huh? Without humans the temperature on the planet would be constant, right?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It takes a while for sheep to be trained to bleat something else.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Dude, we're playing checkers.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Its ironic that one of the potential benefits of geoengineering research is that it will force many climate change deniers to admit that its possible for human activity to have major deleterious effects on Earth's climate.
Probably not. Consider the thoroughly-documented example of the evolutionary process at work in the modern world. This doesn't affect the belief systems of the religious folks, who still insist that evolution is bogus, and has nothing to do with our modern world. One of the major cases is with the over-use of antibiotics, especially in agriculture. This is forcing the evolution of resistance in most of our disease organisms, destroying the value of many of our medicines. The evidence of all this has no effect at all on the religious believers. They also put pressure on the school systems (especially here in the US) to eliminate evolution from the textbooks, so the people responsible for this evolutionary pressure (mostly in agriculture, but also in medicine) don't understand the issues, and continue to make frivolous or incorrect use of the antibiotics.
Historians have documented many such cases in which our ancestors had knowledge that their actions were leading to disasters, but they continued anyway. These are typically cases where short-term actions were profitable to the people doing them, but bad for society in the long run. History says that we humans don't respond logically to such situations. We continue to act for short-term profit, and ignore the long-term results. Our "leaders" also tend to take actions that encourage this, by hiding the information or denying the validity of knowledge that can't be hidden.
There's no reason to expect that we can organize on a global scale to fix such problems. Our political systems tend to be controlled by the wealthier people, who are the ones ultimately profiting from the short-term results of the problems. About all we can do is prepare for the predictable long-term results, when possible.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I'm sure that it's partially because Slashdot is a high-tech oriented site, but it seems like everyone skips to bizarre schemes before considering any of the really simple, really tame geoengineering options available. There doesn't need to be a fleet of aircraft spaying a mysterious chemical to increase Earth's albedo. There doesn't need to be a techniological marvel at the poles freezing CO2 out of the air. As with most things, simple is better.
Look at endeavors like the Marin Carbon Project (links to published peer-review articles within) which diverts waste, composts it, puts it on managed grasslands and improves plant productivity. Some fraction of the plant biomass gets stored below ground for decades or centuries. The dairy farmers don't need to buy/import as much feed which saves them money (and is an additional CO2 offset). Initial numbers look like 1 ton of CO2 per hectare over a 3 year period from one application.
I'm just not certain why we're looking so hard for lots of difficult solutions when there is so much low-hanging fruit. Some pretty simple changes in management practices (I'm looking at you, agriculture) can go a huge way to not only lowering CO2 emissions, but making land be significant net carbon sinks without compromising productivity.
Disclaimer: In the past I worked with one of the lab groups involved with the Marin Carbon Project.
What this will do is turn climate into a tactical weapon. Christ, they've done it with everything else.
What follows assumes that none of the climate change deniers here are shills.
That's not entirely why these people do this. Craziness, I mean. Religion isn't really it either, so much as something usually involved with it. There are three things about human beings that lead to climate change deniers, to include the anthropogenic deniers who don't deny the change itself.
The first influence is that people will usually believe anything repeated to them often enough. Certain pundits have been drilling climate change denial into the heads of viewers for more than a decade.
The second is that people will believe anything tied to their identity. That's why I brought up church. It's not the spiritual beliefs that give rise to this though. It happens that the social groups in churches tend to be deniers, people conform to the ideas of their social groups, and that conformity becomes a part of their identity. It is very difficult for people to accept that any idea supporting their identity is false, no matter how much proof they're shown.
The third is that when the potential solutions to a problem are politically inconvenient, people tend to pretend that there is no problem in the first place. It has only recently been shown that a change to clean energy isn't feasible on the scales necessary to address climate change, and it has been known for years now that the carbon balance approach is too easily rendered ineffectual through politics. Many people still think that recognizing the truth will mean admitting to solutions they consider inconvenient, even though those approaches would not work. So, they push climate change denial.
I bet that the third group finances those who influence the second, and by the time people are part of the first group, they will never, ever be swayed. They'll continue thinking as they do until the day their hearts stop beating, no matter what happens, what evidence they're shown to the contrary, or who shows it to them. But since most of these people have zero impact on policy and big business, that's not what bothers me.
What bothers me is that the more of those three groups somebody fits into, the more they're likely to be hostile to those who disagree with them. They'll call you a troll for daring to suggest that they don't know everything. Off the Internet, I've seen people fly into rages over this kind of thing. I've seen it take people to the brink of trading blows. Once an idea is that deeply rooted, you can't even have a conversation about reality because these people will come around and stink up the place.
"mother nature started this war. now she wants to quit because she is loosing."
It is what it is.
Yes, there has been rapid heating over the last 150 years, as the Earth recovered from the effects of The Little Ice Age. Nothing particularly unusual or exiting about it, because the one thing that's known for sure about the Earth's climate is that it's always changing.
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There's a great idea, plant more forests. I think a great place to start would be to subsidize the planting of forests instead of Corn. Instead of forested land being taxed you get a check from the government for every acre of forest. Make the payouts scale in some way relative to the amount of carbon that the land is likely sequestering. Factor in how well it is maintained, conducting regular burns to get rid of excess dead underbrush that is a forest fire risk.
You have only to look at the jungle compared to that arctic to realize that...
Unless you also compare the jungle to, say, the Sahara.
Incidentally, the arctic is classified as a desert. There's very little precipitation, just like with any other desert.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
It's only "warming" in the sense of a global average
Which also has not been warming either for the past decade or so. :-)
For which, there are a lot of excuses but not much warming... all that time CO2 has continue to increase so obviously what temperature changes there are, is disconnected from CO2.
Ah, such a simple way of looking at it. But the increase in energy retained on the Earth by enhanced greenhouse warming manifests itself in several ways. Not only can the troposphere warm up but the oceans and the land surface can warm up and ice can melt. When you look at the whole picture it's obvious that the Earth continues to warm.
Since around 93% of the warming goes into the oceans normally is doesn't take much of a shift to make a difference in tropospheric warming which is what you've been seeing. There are some hints that that situation may be about to swing back to the situation we had in the 1980's and 1990's so all I can say is enjoy your "no warming for the past decade or so" while you can, it won't last.
Yes, there has been rapid heating over the last 150 years, as the Earth recovered from the effects of The Little Ice Age. Nothing particularly unusual or exiting about it, because the one thing that's known for sure about the Earth's climate is that it's always changing.
The first picture on that page shows an ominous-looking and unprecedented (in the 2000-year period covered by the graph) temperature spike over the last 150 years. This coincides with a rapid rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Even if that is just a coincidence we still have to face the fact that we are probably headed for CO2 concentrations in the 1000+ ppm range, a range where the atmosphere has not been since the Jurassic.
We can hope that the warming will be significantly less severe than the models predict, but it would be good to have a plan B and a plan C when the stakes include all coastal cities around the world.
What exactly do you think the paper says? Did you read it?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How can one not scoff when we've heard in the 1980s that by 2010 NYC'ers were going to be up to their knees in sea water?
Here's a reference for that. We were still getting those predictions in 2001.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Even if the Sun went into a new Maunder Minimum it wouldn't lead to a New Little Ice Age. There's far to much CO2 in the atmosphere now for that to happen. Scientists have analyzed the effect of a new Maunder Minimum and at most it would delay warming by 10 or 20 years.
3. Reducing CO2 emissions, isn't that Geo-engineering?
You've got the logic backwards. Raising CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the last 200+ years has been geoengineering. Reducing CO2 emissions would be cutting back on the geoengineering.
It's only "warming" in the sense of a global average
Which also has not been warming either for the past decade or so. :-)
For which, there are a lot of excuses but not much warming... all that time CO2 has continue to increase so obviously what temperature changes there are, is disconnected from CO2.
Ah, such a simple way of looking at it. But the increase in energy retained on the Earth by enhanced greenhouse warming manifests itself in several ways. Not only can the troposphere warm up but the oceans and the land surface can warm up and ice can melt. When you look at the whole picture it's obvious that the Earth continues to warm.
Since around 93% of the warming goes into the oceans normally is doesn't take much of a shift to make a difference in tropospheric warming which is what you've been seeing. There are some hints that that situation may be about to swing back to the situation we had in the 1980's and 1990's so all I can say is enjoy your "no warming for the past decade or so" while you can, it won't last.
Ah I can help you there. The ARGOS floats show no signs of that heat being "hidden" in the oceans. So I'd have to say that 99.7% of your argument was bullshit with made-up statistics on top.
Thanks for playing.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Ah ok, so if something happened say 20 years ago - the cause of it now is not the same cause as it was back then. Meaning that your global warming "trend" has nothing to do with today's situation, if I follow your "logic". Or where do you draw the line? 100 year old data is ok but 101 year old is not? Why is 150 years ago relevant and 40,000 years ago not?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
We do not know in detail how the climate system works. True, we have some understanding and we know what happens when we release CO2, methane, CFCs to the atmosphere. However, our models are never good enough to predict the outcome of specific effects we introduce to fix the other problems. Normally such things only work in Star Trek and you can run away in your ship if you fail (however they never fail in the series).
But who cares? Lets play Zauberlehrling (engl. sorcerer's apprentice) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... (poem from J.W.v.Goethe) and f*** up the climate. They are from Harvard, therefore that is a really brilliant idea. Well, after reading the original article, they (he) is more into lets address this research topic. Therefore, we need funding. Hello? We need funding for this very important thing otherwise we are all doomed or must stop driven SUVs which means we are all doomed. Thanks.
but dont you see? You have fallen into the same trap, simply on the other side. CLimate change stoped being about actual climate years ago and its simply just another political tool that is used today to keep the public bickering.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Of course it would come to this.
This is precisely what was wrong with politicizing climate change. Eventually, someone would want to _do_ something. Because that is precisely the kind of mindset of a person who gets involved in politics.
Unfortunately, while we may explore what it is we can _do_, the repercussions of those actions are unknown. We do not understand our climate sufficiently to predict the impact of our actions.
Need proof of that? Ask for the assumptions made in the existing crop of climate models and the sensitivity to perturbations of those assumptions.
Fact: we can't predict the climate even when we don't mess with it, why do we think we can predict what will happen when we do?
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Yes, yes, but someone is wrong on the internet.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Just see the thousands of water and soil samples with Barium and Aluminum thousands of times higher than the U.S. Government says is required to take action.
Chemtrails, The Conspiracy that is true.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
It's all relevant.
You seem the be under the misaprehension that climate science doesn't examine past climate.
We know AGW is happening because we've examined past climate and seen how it works.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
The idea is derived from mass balance. Humid outside air entering the house displaces dryer conditioned air leaving the house. If you measure humidity inside and outside, calculate the partial pressure of H2O vapor inside and outside, measure the condensed liquid from your dehumidifier or A/C drain, voila, you know the rate of air exchange.
This is far from my own idea -- I read about it in a government report that came about in the "1st Energy Crisis" of the 70's and early 80's in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo followed by the Iranian Revolution. The usual way to measure air infiltration is with a blower door, but this way seems to require less fuss. The air infiltration number by this method, however, are "all over the place."
What went wrong? I don't have any incontrovertible "science" quantifying any of this, but I have some guesses, hypotheses to some people, beliefs to others. One, the amount of air infiltration varies with wind speed. The whole idea behind the blower door is you apply a pressure differential way in excess of the wind pressure on the day of the test to control for that. Two, and this is just an intuition, the single-compartment model must be wrong. The walls of your house act as a sink for moisture, one that is ambient temperature dependent and also has significant lags in exchanging moisture with the inside air. Three, family members add humidity by bathing, cooking, and simply breathing, but I tried to control for this by taking measurements when I was alone and limiting time of showers, etc.
I simply gave up on this method. The effect that air exchange will either increase the humidity level of the house or increase the water in your dehumidifier bucket is "science", yes, but it is a kind of incontrovertible hard science of mass balance. On the other hand, the effect I tried to measure appeared to be swamped by these effects for which I was unable to control. Furthermore, countering confirmation bias took a great effort of will -- you get these "runs" that "don't make sense" and then you get a run consistent with the model, and you go "aha, this makes sense, this is the infiltration level of this house." It is kind of like someone asks you "what kind of gas mileage you getting from your new car" and you report a favorable high reading from memory instead an average from your receipts and odometer reading showing a much lower number.
Yes, there is the contingent that dares, "Take my SUV away when you pry my cold, dead fingers off the steering wheel." But there is also a contingent that knows how much the global temperature has increased in the last century and why, and when challenged starts getting all huffy and starts using four-letter words.
Historians have documented many such cases in which our ancestors had knowledge that their actions were leading to disasters, but they continued anyway. These are typically cases where short-term actions were profitable to the people doing them, but bad for society in the long run. History says that we humans don't respond logically to such situations. We continue to act for short-term profit, and ignore the long-term results.
We don't need to look to our ancestors. The Liars Loans and Subprime Mortgages that led to the Great Recession are pretty recent. People flipping properties based on the "greater fool" theory ended up finding they were left without a seat when the game of musical chairs stopped.
The bankruptcy of GM ("We'll continue to make gas guzzlers because that's what we made the most profit on last year") is another example. And still we don't change our actions, because "nobody else is .."
Heck, something as simple as recycling has been made dead easy ("no need to pre-sort - just dump it in the recycling bin") and most people still don't.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Oh really?
I'm sure he'll conveniently ignore that. You should have added 'thanks for playing'
Sometimes, I wonder if the percentage of slashdot population who really ought to be on medication is somewhat higher than the general population.
Actually, that article seems pretty measured. Talks a lot about increases in storm surge related incidents, increased costs from storm damage, droughts and water shortages in some areas. I don't see anywhere in there it's claiming that NYC will be knee deep in sea water in 2010, unless it's the result of a storm surge. Which is exactly what happened.
Assertion, pulled out of your ass, with absolutely no supporting evidence.
Very bad sock puppetry. -5
Now that the Republicans have a majority in Congress climate change will be abolished. It will not longer exist, Ted Cruz said so.
I don't care for online climate change deniers. You use the word "facts". Let's talk about facts. Suppose I tried to debate this nutjob. First of all, this person already decided what they "believe," and everything they read will be twisted into evidence supporting their predetermined conclusion. Therefore, right off the bat, actual debate is impossible. They've already decided what they think is true. So, we'd go back and forth. They would post evidence supporting their perspective, and off to Google I'd go to dig up rebuttals from actual climatologists. That will take time because the climate change denial groups are always generating new bunk data, new misinterpretations of published papers, and new misrepresentations of past quotes. One can't just keep a database of counterevidence because they've always got new bullshit. After however much time I'd spend researching rebuttals, that person would just keep replying with more bullshit. They either wouldn't read the counterpoints or wouldn't understand them. Then they'd pull out the ever-present Final Tactic by telling me that they know what they're talking about because they're a pilot, physics student, congressional aide, or whatever. They'll try to follow up bunk "science" with anecdote. By the time the whole thing concluded, I will have failed to convince them because it was never a possibility to begin with. They will have failed to convince me because I actually look at the science and don't delude myself. Then, out there somewhere at their keyboard will sit some layperson who just wants to get along with their church group, some paid anti-climate change shill, or just an everyday idiot repeating what they've been told. So. 1. They won't convince anybody. 2. Nobody can convince them. Therefore, their bringing the subject up to start with is masturbatory and annoying. It accomplishes nothing that walking into a movie theater and announcing over a megaphone that the world is flat wouldn't accomplish. The most constructive response is thus, "God damnit, can you just stop this already?" Optionally, this may be peppered with, "Please just go away."
SURE IT IS BUNK. Tell that to Buffalo NewYork, a city that never had 3 meters of snow in a year, and explain how 3 meters of snow fell in 3 days. Explain the collapsed roofs and deaths from the storm. Now that snow is the sticky wet kind, and rain is forecast for today. Sorry for all the residents in and around Buffalo.
Aren't we glad the scientists of the '70s were not followed blindly? http://www.washingtonsblog.com...
Is that 10 or 20 years after the 20 years we just had for no explainable reason?
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
I'm playing tiddlywinks. No wonder i can't get a win.
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
There are plenty of reasons why the past decade+ has had a lower rate of temperature rise than expected. Among them are the current solar cycle was lower than expected, there have been some relatively small but regular volcanic eruptions putting aerosols in the atmosphere, aerosols from industrialization in SE Asia have suppressed temperatures somewhat, the PDO has been in a negative phase, La Nina's have dominated over El Nino's. Put those and some other things together and you get a lower rate of temperature rise. The oceans where over 93% of the heat goes have continued to heat up.
That post nails the "debate".
We shouldn't be fooling around like this.
I suppose you feel it's better that we continue to fool around blindly so long as money can be made in the process... lets let the invisible hand fix it right?
Or even better, lets make it worse so that we can access the Antarctic and Arctic sources of oil faster. The military doesn't deny it, and are making strategies that consider it, because our enemies don't deny it either. And when you look at the actions of the oil companies in these regions, they're taking advantage of it too. There's about to be a veritable gold rush, and it can't happen so long as there's so much ice.
It's obvious we don't understand, or are too corrupt and greedy to admit, that there's no problem.
We are too corrupt and greedy to admit that there is a problem. A lot of money is on the line if we do something about it. So if you want to make money... everything is fine right? The invisible hand fixes it, and if not, then God is punishing us for permitting gay marriage.
You have to understand the difference between weather and climate. The fact that we had one warm month is weather. It is not a long term trend. It is one month.
Your next statement is kinda funny, having read this one. I guess we can't use anecdotes, but by-golly you can. In any case, cold months are also not indicative a long term trend. It's just weather. But, when you combine the data from all over the world, and not just one location that is hit by polar vortexes thrown from Canada, the trend becomes apparent. That is where the climate change data comes from.
Of course, I'm wasting my time.
Are you suggesting that a few billion people burning shitloads of coal and changing the albedo of huge areas of land has had zero effect? No? Obviously not because that would be retarded. Well it doesn't look like the above poster was suggesting the Ice age was the fault of people either.
Not for everyone. It's only purely political for those who are so limited that everything is purely political. See also the idiots who try to cast science as a rival religion.
We tried that but the banks said they preferred coal to nuclear.
Environmentalists had fuckall say in anything in the 1980s. If they really had the political power you suggest they did then we would have sorted out this climate change "debate" in the 1980s as well.
Funny how you went from something like "there is no warming" to something like "but warming is good!"
I await the next instalment.
The idea behind the "hiatus", "little or no warming" is wrong. See the link below for an explanation.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/20...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Many of the plans to engineer global cooling to reverse the effects of global warming involve partially shading the planet. This could have very bad unintended consequences because we need the light for plants. The problem with global warming isn't that we get too much sunlight: the problem is that the greenhouse gases trap the infrared radiation that we need to shed. Here is a solution to that and another problem. The other problem is that during the day, solar panels lose efficiency because they get hot. If solar panels were mounted onto a heat sink that conducts heat away from the cells and stores that heat, it would help keep the solar cells cooler and they would operate more efficiently. When the sun sets, the cells could swing away from he heat sink exposing a very dark surface on the heat sink. That would enhance the radiation of infrared light from the heat sink so that the heat sink would cool. Even though some of the infrared light would still be blocked by greenhouse gasses, more heat would be shed because of the efficiency of black body radiation, and because the radiation can be focused straight up minimizing the thickness of atmosphere it has to penetrate to escape Earth. Alternatively, large swaths of the earth's under-productive surfaces can be covered by heat sinks that have a reflective coating on one side and a black surface on the other. During the day it reflects light back into space and at night it flips around exposing its dark surface to space so it can radiate heat back towards space. This would also create jobs for people to build, install, and maintain the radiators.
Many jungles, such as the Amazon, have very poor soil and only function because of rainfall and an interconnected ecosystem. That sort of interconnectedness is the antithesis of modern large scale monoculture farming. You need to be able to foster the production & maintenance of soil - or use a lot of petrochemical based fertilizer.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
However we do it, we'd be turning down the thermostat to a setting we've lived through in the present & recent past.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Just remember to get buy-in from ALL stakeholders, first!
(good luck with that).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I don't see anywhere in there it's claiming that NYC will be knee deep in sea water in 2010,
Uh, what exactly do you want me to say, that your reading comprehension sucks? I'm sorry that you can't see it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ok, mischaracterizing troll is troll. I see.
You're the guy who mischaracterized the statement "the west side highway will be underwater" to mean "the west side highway will only be underwater during tremendous storms."
If you are not a shill, then you're the kind of guy who will misunderstand anything to avoid changing his position. Because you deeply misunderstand that statement there.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
No, you stated this:
Jane, that's not research you'd have to do before claiming that the globe is warming. You'd only have to do that research before attributing the warming to a particular cause. The only research you have to do before claiming that the globe is warming is to read the last sentence in the Llovel et al. 2014 abstract, and ask yourself if the bottom edge of their confidence interval is positive. Is it?
Once again, the Llovel et al. 2014 conclusion regarding abyssal ocean temperatures depends on the globe warming. I've already explained why. If you didn't understand the equations I wrote down, just ask for help. Once you understand those equations, you'll finally see why you can't cite Llovel et al. 2014 regarding abyssal ocean temperatures while also claiming that the globe isn't warming.
Sadly, that's exactly the response I expected.
I've written about many issues with GRACE, and released my source code. Here’s a quick link to browse the “control panel” of my code, followed by the top level of the program itself. All the functions used in that file are declared here and defined in full here.
So Jane will have to be more specific. I've written about many issues with GRACE, but none that qualify as "rather huge problems".
Past experienc
So will Jane stop incorrectly claiming that the globe isn't warming, or will Jane stop citing Llovel et al. 2014, which depends on the globe warming? Or will he simply chug along without acknowledging this contradiction?
Will Jane ever support his accusation about GRACE with a link to whichever WUWT article he thinks supports his accusation? Or will he simply keep making that accusation with no evidence whatsoever?
Completely backwards, as usual. In reality, Jane didn't notice that his electrical heating power halved when the enclosing shell was added, because Jane counted radiative power twice.
Good grief, not this nonsense again. I never described a positive feedback loop that occured only once, then stopped. In fact, several months ago I explained that the equations I'm using account for an infinite series of reflections. But as MIT explained, this infinite sum converges to a finite temperature.
Jane's never adequately explained why Venus is hotter than Mercury. Is Venus hotter than Mercury because of CO2, gray Oreos, or basketball player gloves?
I've had to deal with innumerable assaults by rude people who don't understand the physics, and then accuse me of being rude and insulting without evidence. Somehow, I've managed to avoid accusing them of being "complete and utter idiots" who are brain dead and hate themselves and everything else and go far beyond Nazism and want to murder people.
Actually, Jane's claiming that Mr. Postma understands the physics of the problem better than me, Prof. Brown, Dr. Joel Shore, th
Often times the problem is the US sanctioning countries or forcing them to agree to ridiculous debts. This has historically been the greatest problem with non-free market systems.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Once again, I explained that the equations I'm using account for an infinite series of reflections. But as MIT explained, this infinite sum converges to a finite temperature. If Jane thinks he's found a mistake in MIT's derivation, please let everyone know exactly where.
And Jane, that wasn't a couple of years ago. I refuted your Sky Dragon Slayer nonsense 3 months ago, not a couple of years ago. It probably just feels like years because you've been cussing and screaming and insisting you're right and I'm wrong for hundreds of pages. Seriously, look at the index at the top of that comment, which has links to this never ending “conversation” LINK, LINK, LINK. BACKUP 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Jane, have you ever considered the possibility that I didn't make an error, and that you simply don't understand physics as well as professional physicists do? For instance, you screwed up the very first equation because you don't know how to apply conservation of energy to a boundary around the heated source. I've tried to show you how to derive that equation, but you've repeatedly refused. Why?
Furthermore, you won't even ask a physicist you respect if electrical heating power depends on the cooler chamber wall temperature. This would be even easier than writing down a single equation. Just ask Prof. Cox (or any other mainstream physicist) and their answer might finally help you see why your Sky Dragon Slaye
Oops, 4 months ago. Still not a couple of years.